Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 16, 2009 @04:30PM
from the alcohol-project-leads-to-endowment dept.

Al writes "Dow Chemical has given its backing to a Florida startup called Algenol Biofuels that hopes to produce commercial quantities of ethanol directly from algae without the need for fresh water or agricultural lands. Dozens of companies are trying to produce biofuels from algae, mostly by growing and harvesting the microorganisms to extract their oil. Algenol has chosen instead to genetically enhance certain strains of blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, to convert as much carbon dioxide as possible into ethanol using a process that doesn't require harvesting to collect the fuel. Algenol's bioreactors are troughs covered by a dome of semitransparent film and filled with salt water that has been pumped in straight from the ocean. The photosynthetic algae growing inside are exposed to sunlight and fed a stream of carbon dioxide from Dow's chemical production units. The goal is to produce 100,000 gallons of ethanol annually."

My first question after reading TFS is where these little buggers go after the salt water is pumped in. Presumably, the salt water is pumped out at some point in time.... Oh, don't worry, I'm sure they filter them out after returning them to the ocean - yeah somehow I highly doubt it.

I agree this type of stuff is the least worst choice, but something about genetically modified bacteria designed to produce fuel, in the ocean gives me the creeps.

I agree this type of stuff is the least worst choice, but something about genetically modified bacteria designed to produce fuel, in the ocean gives me the creeps.

It is producing alcohol. It is spending a part of its energy budget into producing alcohol, which is totally useless for reproduction and survival. Thus out in the wild it will be swamped out by the regular bacteria. Remember the currently bacteria living in the ocean have been fighting it out for some 3 billion years and they are as fine tuned to optimum as they can get. Any deviation from it is likely to fall at a suboptimal point in the fitness landscape. Any large deviation like producing alcohol is really a saltation. It will land it so far off the starting point in the fitness landscape it is likely to be much much lower than optimum.

It is producing alcohol. It is spending a part of its energy budget into producing alcohol, which is totally useless for reproduction and survival. Thus out in the wild it will be swamped out by the regular bacteria. Remember the currently bacteria living in the ocean have been fighting it out for some 3 billion years and they are as fine tuned to optimum as they can get. Any deviation from it is likely to fall at a suboptimal point in the fitness landscape. Any large deviation like producing alcohol is really a saltation. It will land it so far off the starting point in the fitness landscape it is likely to be much much lower than optimum.

Or the alcohol produced will make the immediate area uninhabitable for the existing buggers. This genetically modified version will start with a small area but reproduce and wipe out not only the competing bacteria, but all other marine life as they upset the balance that currently exists......these things not only change the scale biologically, but environmentally. Who will win? Who knows right now. But both outcomes are possible.....and it only takes a couple of mutations for it to swing a different w

Got it, in one! Bioengineering is potentially dangerous. Various analogs of the "grey goo" problem are a real bioengineering risk today, and we're not ready to deal with it any more than the far future hypothetical nano-engineering risk. Corporations, by default, will be inclined to ignore risks like this, and it's not clear how to effectively regulate it. Think the financial crisis was a problem? Wait until we make our first major screw up with bioengineering.

Do you really think nanotech is going to win against the reigning champions who have been beating all comers for millennia?

We tend to want organisms which dedicate their energy to doing something for us, they'd be up against organisms which have been adapting to dedicate their energy to helping themselves for millions of generations.

Think your tiny robots, whatever their size, with 0 years of optimisation

"Do you really think nanotech is going to win against the reigning champions who have been beating all comers for millennia?"

I wouldn't be surprised. If you've played around with genetic algorithms on your computer, you've probably realized that while they are fun and cool, and amazingly versatile, for pretty much any specific problem there is a better solution. Put differently, intelligently designed solutions beat the crap out of evolved ones, if you can be bothered to implement one. Amazing as evolved or

At that scale it's basically all chemical warfare and who can adapt fastest.

Sure any kind of grey goo might get an initial advantage but if it can't evolve itself then the moment it hits a micro-organism it can't quite kill it's fucked.

If it can itself evolve then either you're going to have to come up with some approach to stop individual units from mutating and preying on each other in which case the blob's energy gets spent largely on fighting itself at which

In general I think you're right. In this particular case, though....Various things have been using ethanol for chemical warfare for as long as we can figure. I really, really, doubt that this will be something that can compete outside of a carefully regulated and tailored environment. (And even there it may have problems.)

I bet they need to keep a separate stockpile that they breed from, and periodically replace the old cultures from their base stock. And check the base stock that is hasn't been accumul

Actually, ethanol is highly corrosive, and as such most flex-fuel vehicles have much more stainless steel parts (hence the extra expense). A few other disadvantages are that ethanol is ruined if mixed with water, ethanol tends to grow mold, and ethanol has a much lower energy density than gasoline.

I don't understand why they're not using the algae for biodisesel instead of crappy ethanol.

I'm going to combine some replies here, so I apologize. First of all, ethanol doesn't grow mold inside the fuel, but the vapors support mold to grow on any surface not submerged in the fuel. Next time you pass a tank farm, the tank with black crap at the top near the vents is the ethanol tank.

Ok, I used imprecise language, but ethanol is more corrosive than gasoline. And stainless steel is much more expensive than regular steel, and isn't nearly as durable in the long run.

Wrong. Ethanol has much lower energy concentration than gasoline. So equivalent amounts won't let you go as far in identically designed engines that are near optimum for both. (What did you expect? It's a shorter hydrocarbon chain.)

OTOH, it does have many good characteristics (besides being a good organic solvent).

Even if you were to use unsterilized water, which is a big no no in bioreactors, if you dump in enough of your tailored algae it's going to have a shot at overwhelming whatever's there simply by virtue of a gigantic head start.

Actually, I wonder if the ethanol could serve as a sterilizing agent. Presumably the fuel algae are themselves resistant to it, whereas most microorganisms are not. In a high-ethanol environment, they might have the upper hand over normal algae.

Mix X units of ethanol with Y units of seawater, seed with algae, allow photosynthesis, and (eventually) extract 2X units of ethanol, setting aside one unit for reuse. Lather, rinse, repeat. The only stuff you need to do is add more water, more nutrients and remo

Maybe. It sounds like the ethanol is a normal waste product of anaerobic respiration, which the unmodified bacteria produces in oxygen-poor conditions. They've modified the stuff to always use the anaerobic respiration pathway. They may have added some ethanol resistance, but not necessarily.

Incidentally, since anaerobic respiration is spectacularly inefficient compared to aerobic respiration, this bacteria must be at a really, really serious disadvantage when up against it's unmodified cousins.

ethanol and salt mixes with water. As such, they will likely use a distillation or a chromatograph to separate ethanol from the water and salt. To do that, means that it will run better if they do not have the algae in there. I think that they will have some sieve filters that will hold back large molecules, which will also hold back the algae.

No need to pump the salt water out- ethanol has a lower boiling point, so you simply boil it out of the tank- leaving the salt water behind to grow more algae. The ocean only is the initial input- from there on out, the tank produces ethanol until the algae dies.

The salt water isn't pumped out. The alcohol evaporates into the air at the top of the bioreactor and is skimmed off. The bioreactor does produce fresh water as a "waste product" but presumably they seem rather optimistic about finding a better use for that than dumping it in the ocean.

The algae aren't doing anything new, they are just doing much more of what they can already do. If this made them more able to survive in the wild than current algae, evolution would have produced them already. Instead, we have a bunch of algae which waste most of their energy pointlessly making and leaking ethanol - they won't survive long. Also, ethanol won't cause any harm unless in high concentrations. There are already lots of natural critters who produce ethanol, especially yeasts.

So far the money doesn't work! Creating 100,000 gallons of alcohol equals about 50,000 gallons of gasoline. The size and complexity of the facility indicates that this will loose money unless it scales up to far greater production.

Good for Dow. It's probably about time some company jumped on this. I'm just waiting for one of the big oil companies to shut them down so they can go back to using expensive corn crops for ethanol. I mean, corn? Really? Couldn't they have come up with anything more costly that produces less ethanol? Oh! Coming in 2015 from Shell: puppy ethanol!

The use of corn has less to do with oil companies than it has to do with pork barrel politics in farm states. Biodiesel will probably never be competitive with fossil fuels on a purely economic basis, so it's hard to believe the oil companies care.

This technology has a LONG way to go, 100,000 gallons per year is quite litterally nothing in the energy business.

For example, the Alaska oil field, which produces quite a lot of oil but nowhere near what is needed, put out an average of 650,000 barrels per day, or just shy of 30 million gallons per day. That's ten and a half billion with a "B" gallons per year. Also bear in mind that Alaska accounts for only 1/3 the total oil production in North America, and also remember that the US must import 80% of i

First you do a research study. Probably in glass on a lab bench.Then you do a pilot project. This is in steel, larger reactors, etc. and is intended mainly to find out how things scale.Then you do a demo project. This is a really small scale version. Probably still too small to be economic.Then you do a small scale commercial plant.Where you go from there depends on how successful it is, but if you don't get this far, you just kill the whole thing off.

Note, the only reason I repeat myself is that I get this message when I try to leave out the body:
"Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment... like the body or the subject!)"

Note, the only reason I repeat myself is that I get this message when I try to leave out the body:"Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment... like the body or the subject!)"

I think you mean, "I tried to post like an idiot by putting my message in the subject field, but Slashdot tried to save me from myself. I'll show them by being an idiot anyway!".

100 barrels per acre per year is NOT at ALL promising! To produce the current US consumption you would need ~137K square miles. For reference that would require the entire east coast be filled to ~55 miles inland.

For reference that would require the entire east coast be filled to ~55 miles inland.

Ever driven across the central part of the US? There's lots of corn... 87 million acres, or about 136,000 square miles [usda.gov], actually. Now, I know not all of that corn is used for ethanol production. However, there are large swaths of land in the US within reasonable distance of an ocean which aren't much use beyond growing pine for timber (like coastal areas of North Carolina or Texas) because they're not suited for growing other crops. This could be a much more efficient use for such land.

Plus, not all of that 24 acres is actually producing ethanol. We're talking 3100 tanks that take up 250 square feet each, or about 17.79 acres. As this technology matures and as farms are scaled up, you'll likely see increased output per acre.

But less than 2,400 barrels of ethanol (~1,600 barrels of oil) is such a small drop in the bucket as to be laughable (The US consumes ~21M barrels a day!). Of course scale it up and feed it the output of some GW scale coal plants and you are starting to make at least some impact.

When considering new technology, scale is largely irrelevant. For a proof-of-concept, 2,400 barrels is not much more or less useful than 240 or 2.4 million, since even at the latter level, it's more an indication of how well funded the project is than it is an indication of the usefulness of the technology.

The questions are:

1) Can it be done?

2) Can it be done cheaply enough?

After those two questions are answered with "yes", then scale is largely a matter of getting sufficient capital, and working out the me

Yes, but you won't know the answer to your second question until you have operated a plant at (or near) commercial scales which this obviously isn't. That's why I said it's a nice technology demonstration, it's nothing like a test plant. It's more an intermediate step between the test-tube and a pilot plant.

After those two questions are answered with "yes", then scale is largely a matter of getting sufficient capital, and working out the mechanics.

Ethanol still has two crushing problems:1. Anything over 10% ethanol (E10) destroys the fuel systems of old(er) cars. There are a lot of old(er) cars.2. E10 ruins most small motors (tractors, lawnmowers, weedwackers, etc) and is awful for marine applications.

You can pump out all the cheap ethanol you like, but until all those "legacy" engines are out of service, ethanol cannot reach its full potential.

Actually, I could see it becoming interesting if it were made smaller-scale and efficient enough to have individual fuel producing systems for rural and distant suburban dwellers. Enhance public transit in cities (reducing the need for cars) where land is scarce, and it might be very well worth it for places where driving is essential and the grid is less reliable.

Another (small but important) contribution to the many different ways we can kick fossil fuel dependence and go with renewable sources.

Not to mention the advantages of being able to relocate the source of the raw material, rather than being tied down to wherever it happened to accumulate over the past millennia (and yes, I realize that this is still true to a certain extent with oceans, but I'll take 70% of the surface of the planet over what is far less than 1% of the total volume of the planet, and always a bitch to get to any day of the week). Anyone who watches Ice Road Truckers should easily see the vast cost savings that would come f

Only where both land is fairly flat and quite cheap... and there's reasonable access to salt water. Of course, I can think of a lot of land like that in Southern Calif., New Mexico and Texas. And, of course, in Mexico, where they've got a contract of another plant. And along the Sahara.

I don't know how much water these things need. It might not be unreasonable to pipe it in. It sounds like it's basically a closed system outside of air, but with some water lost in evaporation. That could be minimized

From TFA: "Every gallon of ethanol made creates one gallon of fresh water out of salt water."

This sounds interesting. If this can be cheaply scaled up, it sounds like coastal towns all over the developing world would want to become gas providers for more inland towns -- it solves their water problem at the same time as it solves their cash flow problem.

I suspect there is a lot of distillation in the process as well, to purify the alcohol. So this sort of system would couple well with hot equator sun and passive solar systems.

All this makes me wonder: how much human waste can you pour into the system to fertilize the algae? Can this system be used to solve that problem, too?

And what do you do with the algae? Once you have a full tank, you just want to maintain the status quo, but the algae will continue to reproduce. Could the excess turn into an animal feed?

I assume that TFA wouldn't lie about something as verifiable as the freshwater production thing; but I'd like to have a better idea of how exactly that happens. I don't remember any notable quantity of salt being consumed in any aspect of photosynthesis or biological ethanol production.

Nothing quite so exotic- the salt is going to end up a toxic byproduct of this process. The rest is just solar-based distillation- salt water + algae + sun -> fresh water + ethanol, which is then further distilled down into it's component parts.

I'm sure the EPA or other agency has an "allowable salinity" restriction on water dumped into the ocean. If it is less than, say, double the normal salinity, they'll probably just stick it back in the ocean.

They are doing this in Florida. People in Florida would drink petroleum from the genitals of an GM anthropomorphic bull if it used a song-and-dance routine to explain that they were really drinking "cow's milk"(wink).

Not that all people in Florida are stupid, just that the IQ of the population resembles the graph of the "long tail" instead of a normal distribution.

These are awesome questions. I'm not really on board with this green tech stuff, because I think there is so much bad science out there right now (probably due to the politicization). But your comment almost inspired the geeky excitement I get over other areas of science. Good thoughts...

... using a process that doesn't require harvesting to collect the fuel.

Most of the reasonable plans I've read involve growing algae in ponds, sucking it up, and running it through a press (rather like an olive press)The expensive part of the operation isn't the press - it's the pond.As I recall, NREL recommended holes in the ground lined with plastic, and the pond was still the most expensive part.

$1.25 a gallon is about twice the spot price for methanol, and $1.25 isn't what they can do, it's what they hope they can do eventually.

I'd say that $1.25/gallon is pretty impressive, given the scale they're talking about, which is tiny. 100,000 gallons of ethanol/year? Production plants being built today have anything from one hundred to, in one case one thousand times that capacity.

Why do people build big plants? To achieve economies of scale. If you built a back yard reactor that produced a thousand gallons of ethanol per year at a cost of $1.25, that would be darn impressive. Clearly, this thing is a model.

$1.25 a gallon is about twice the spot price for methanol, and $1.25 isn't what they can do, it's what they hope they can do eventually.

But remember they're using C02 as an input to the process. If cap and trade goes through this would allow them to sell or avoid buying carbon credits for other processes. I think C02 is a relatively common by-product in industrial chemistry. $1.25 isn't too bad if the cost of one of the inputs is negative.

Also, don't underestimate the value of a continuous process. The big knock on batch processing isn't the cost of the press, but rather the complication (and cost) it adds to scaling the process. It's the biggest reason we see all those little pilot projects that seem promising but never go anywhere.

It's negative in the sense that with cap and trade it's going to cost companies money to release C02 into the atmosphere. A company like Dow makes lots of different kinds of industrial chemicals, and C02 is a common byproduct. Of course, eventually that C02 would be released into the atmosphere by whomever buys the biodiesel. But presumably someone else is paying for the carbon offset at that point.

Put it back in the ocean. Any water that was extracted will end up there eventually. Even if it didn't it would be difficult to raise the salinity of the oceans by any measurable amount. If that were ever a concern, just flush the the salt into the ocean with the fresh water collected and have zero net salinity change.

It is. The CO2 from the coal-fired plant would not go away. It would be converted into ethanol and then released back as CO2 when the ethanol was burned.

The reason some people are so excited about bio-fuels is they are supposedly "carbon neutral." They take CO2 out of the atmosphere, then release it back when burned. If one were to use CO2 from coal combustion instead, then the CO2 stored in the alcohol is coming out of the ground. In other words, inserting algae into the coal -> atmosphere chain does not change the carbon balance, only interrupts it.

It is possible that adding algae into the chain could make energy production more efficient (more joules of energy per ton of total CO2 emissions) and may still be worth doing.

My concern is that the coal plant owner would convince the general public (who by and large do not understand such basic scientific laws as conservation of mass) that their CO2 is a "green energy source" and therefore should not be taxed/capped as a greenhouse gas. In other words, using coal exhaust to feed the algae is basically playing a shell game -- "which one has the CO2 under it now?"

The point to remember is that bio-fuels do not provide a net benefit to CO2 reduction. Ever. They're simply carbon neutral or approximately so.

As another poster has noted, reusing the carbon once and reburning it halves the carbon consumption. But when you clean burn an alcohol based fuel, what do you get? Water and Carbon Dioxide. Meaning that you now have two of the three inputs into the fuel cycle, and if you only recycle the carbon dioxide one more time that makes the net carbon hit only a fourth of what it would be from coal fired, etc.

Meaning that given the solar input which drives the algae to produce anyway, that if scalable this seems

Don't be so dismissive of bio-fuels. Remember that the purpose of bio-fuel is to replace fossil fuels, and the CO2 that goes with burning them. That advantage holds true here as well. Yes, the carbon is released when the bio-fuels are burned. But (CO2 from industrial process into atmosphere plus CO2 from fossil fuel into atmosphere) > (CO2 from industrial process made into bio-fuel, then burned and released into atmosphere) You aren't just moving around carbon production, you're also producing a lot

Well, that's not quite true. If we could replace overseas oil with this product, then we would reduce carbon emissions by however much foreign oil this new fuel supplants. It would also render us safer in the sense that we have assloads of coal here in the United States. It is true that it would not be as nice as using some other source of CO2 and at the same time closing down coal powerplants. But note that the two are not mutually exclusive: if we have some other source of carbon dioxide (as apparentl

It is. The CO2 from the coal-fired plant would not go away. It would be converted into ethanol and then released back as CO2 when the ethanol was burned.

The reason some people are so excited about bio-fuels is they are supposedly "carbon neutral." They take CO2 out of the atmosphere, then release it back when burned. If one were to use CO2 from coal combustion instead, then the CO2 stored in the alcohol is coming out of the ground. In other words, inserting algae into the coal -> atmosphere chain does not change the carbon balance, only interrupts it.

It is possible that adding algae into the chain could make energy production more efficient (more joules of energy per ton of total CO2 emissions) and may still be worth doing.

My concern is that the coal plant owner would convince the general public (who by and large do not understand such basic scientific laws as conservation of mass) that their CO2 is a "green energy source" and therefore should not be taxed/capped as a greenhouse gas. In other words, using coal exhaust to feed the algae is basically playing a shell game -- "which one has the CO2 under it now?"

The point to remember is that bio-fuels do not provide a net benefit to CO2 reduction. Ever. They're simply carbon neutral or approximately so.

You're wrong, at least partially. The ethanol does not displace extra electricity production, but could displace extra oil production. Think of it this way. Right now there are A LOT of coal plants. They aren't going anywhere any time soon. Hooking them up to this to make lots of ethanol would enable us to displace a lot of oil that is currently being burned in cars. So, this CO2 does get "burned" twice, but it does save the CO2 from the gallons of gasoline that are not being burned, but would have be

As a side effect, through ADDITIONAL processing, we can get water that can be filtered into drinking water, without actually having to run through traditional desalination.

As a dreadful side effect, we'll have a mass of biowaste, and every last contaiminant in the ocean cleaned from the water becomes a toxic sludge waste, which will include large amounts of murcury, other heavy metals, and some farily dangerous compounds mixed in with some poitentially useful organic materials and other compunds.

well, since it's a direct competitor to the big boys who have real money in political pockets, there are no grants that projects like this can actually qualify for, let alone be awarded.

This is a small company with 30 or so researchers from a small town. They're moving the technology forward, but until they can collect 10-15 million in investments, they can't build a proof of concept faciltiy. Once they have a system up and running, that's just a POC, and won;t prove the cost points, they'll need about 75

I can just see it now, we create some sort of alge that somehow gets out of its containment unit, and gone uncheckedreplicates itself until it has no more source of fuel, oxygen that is, to continue reproducing, cutting our own air supply....sounds like we might be needing to bottle air up just in case a sort of self inflicted disaster occurs....! O_O

I can't believe that I of all people have to be the one to point this out. (Please bear in mind when I say that, that I am one of those Free Energy dudes who thinks Pons & Fleishmann were on to something and that it was suppressed).

--I mean, I'd be as happy as anybody for a smart solution to the fuel problem to be embraced by industry. While wind and solar farming seem to be catching on, hydrogen and electric vehicles seem to be anathema. But anyway, the point of this post. ..

I don't actually have a problem with bio-fuels if they are used correctly. --Oil is a bio-fuel which just happens to have been stored for millions of years. Basically, plants convert and store sunlight energy, and so it's essentially using Life to harvest solar power. It's the way in which food crops are being used to fuel cars which causes trouble.

I'd love to see a smart solution like the one you suggest. But after all the arguing is over and the dust has settled, it really comes down to this one

The Polytechnic campus of ASU in Mesa, AZ has created jet fuel out of algae [abc15.com]. That school has been focusing on many other solar technologies as well, since Arizona annually has an abundance of sunny days.